body positivity at carleton college and beyond

Dear Fox News: You Suck.

This is only a 1 minute segment, but there’s a lot wrong with it. See how many things you can find that make you feel uncomfortable, offended, or objectified.

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1. They are playing “It’s Getting Hot in Here” in the background – now, I like a good background beat just like anyone else, but that song is certainly about objectifying women for their bodies, plain and simple.

2. The caption says “Women getting hotter, men staying ugly.” It doesn’t say beautiful, which acknowledges attractive features while allowing the person to be more than an object, but the inherently sexualized and objectifying word “hot.”

3. The anchors discuss the findings in a very insulting way – saying “duh” when it’s said that attractive women have more children. Clearly, if you don’t conform to society’s definition of hot, you won’t have children. Nevermind that couples that intentionally have children are often based on more than that, and unplanned pregnancies can happen to anyone, as can infertility. Not to mention the fact that words like “hot” and” beautiful” mean very different things to different people.

4. The women they show are straight out of Maxim or Playboy – not shown as wholly beautiful, not involved in healthy family life or planning to have children, but all incredibly sexualized images. The poses are all the same and all based on one particular standard of beauty. No pictures of happy couples or mothers and children here.

5. When they talk about the men, it’s hard to tell what was written in the report and what was their own commentary, but they don’t even question the idea that beauty is a woman’s evolutionary role, and financial success is a man’s evolutionary role, and that still continues, and that those are equivalent goals for men and women to pursue.

6. In addition, they cite the ability of successful men to “take care of” beautiful women, and the female anchor says something along the lines of “that is our secret evil plan and it’s working.” Really? REALLY? All women have a secret plan to become beautiful, find the biological equivalent of a successful man, and force them to take care of them while reproducing? Is that really all women are equipped to do? And we’re IN ON IT? We love being objectified, demeaned, and having our ability to achieve anything other than a skinny waist and a sexy pose questioned. It’s awesome, really.

Anything I missed? Because I pretty much always have problems with the way women are treated and discussed on Fox News, but this was too appalling to ignore

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Also, where is this “scientific research” coming from? How do you quantify “beauty” or “hotness” in a study? And who is doing the rating? (semi-rhetorical question, it’s probably white heterosexual men doing the ratings because they’re the only unbiased ones out there). And over what period of time did they do these ratings? How do we know how beautiful women were 100 years ago or 1000 years ago versus now?

And obviously these “beautiful” women are likely to have “beautiful” daughters, because you know, people frequently look like their parents (must be something about them sharing genes y’know).

And another thing about the background pictures, I know they’re trying to be funny, but showing five beautiful women and two “ugly” men shows absolutely nothing about the relative proportions of beautiful to ugly people in the world.

Great analysis of some ridiculous foolishness. This Fox “report” also suggests that “people” are white people. All the men and women they show as they discuss this report of who’s “hot” and who’s not are white. So what’s that supposed to mean? That all the “hottest” women are white, and all the men who get together with them, or fail to get together with them, are white too? Didn’t the study they’re reporting on also study non-white people?

Sadly, I didn’t even think of that when I watched it! Like Lisa said (https://happybodies.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/do-you-have-blue-eyes/), we’re so programmed to think not only that skinny, sexually-posed, scantily-clad women are “hot,” but also that that hotness is inherently white (with the occasional fetishized Asian woman or other “acceptable” minority exception). Even those of us who look for that stuff are not immune. Thank you for pointing that out!